MIT Comparative Media Studies: News

From Sticky To Spreadable: The Antidote to "Viral Marketing" and the Broadcast Mentality

2009-11-16T15:36:28Z

Many thanks to CMS alum/C3 researcher Sam Ford for putting together the presentation below. It also features former CMS director Henry Jenkins and C3 researcher Joshua Green.

From Sticky To Spreadable: The Antidote to "Viral Marketing" and the Broadcast Mentality from Michael Blankenship on Vimeo.

How do you understand and measure success in social media?

How do you create content that audiences not only pay attention to, but want to share with others?

Do you really want to make a video "go viral"?

How does the language you use to describe social media campaigns impact the end result?

Based on years of researching how and why people spread news, popular culture, and marketing content online through the Convergence Culture Consortium for the past several years, our speakers are currently working on a book entitled Spreadable Media. This Webinar will look at what "spreadable media" means, why the concept of "stickiness" is inadequate for measuring success for brands and content producers online and ultimately why marketers and producers should spend more time creating "spreadable material" for audiences than trying to perfect "viral marketing." In this one-hour session, the speakers will share the ideas and strategy behind "spreadable media" and a variety of examples of best--and worst--practices online for both B2B and B2C campaigns.

Podcast: Communications Forum: "The Culture Beat and New Media: Arts Journalism in the Internet Era"

2009-11-13T21:26:36Z

Newspapers and magazines are reducing their critical coverage of the arts, but the human appetite to evaluate culture, to debate reactions and opinions, remains as vibrant as ever. Panelists Doug McLennan (editor of ArtsJournal.com) and Bill Marx (editor of TheArtsFuse.com) discuss how cyberspace is transforming arts journalism, in some cases radically redefining its form and content. The forum debates what critical values from the traditional media should survive, explores how digital media is changing the ways we articulate our responses to the arts, and points to promising contemporary business models and experiments in cultural coverage.

Podcast: "Skinny Jeans and Fruity Loops: the Networked Publics of Global Youth Culture"

2009-11-13T20:38:32Z

What can we learn about contemporary culture from watching dayglo-clad teenagers dancing geekily in front of their computers in such disparate sites as Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, and Mexico City? How has the embrace of "new media" by so-called "digital natives" facilitated the formation of transnational, digital publics? More important, what are the local effects of such practices, and why do they seem to generate such hostile responses and anxiety about the future?

Wayne Marshall is an ethnomusicologist, blogger, DJ, and, beginning this year, a Mellon Fellow in Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT. His research focuses on the production and circulation of popular music, especially across the Americas and in the wider world, and the role that digital technologies are playing in the formation of new notions of community, selfhood, and nationhood.

Learning Matters interviews CMS grad student Hillary Kolos

2009-11-12T15:39:05Z

Hillary Kolos, graduate student here at CMS, spoke with Learning Matters this week about her work with Project New Media Literacies:

I'm interested in the fact that appropriation is one of the literacies-this one seems particularly specific to internet culture and is something that all internet journalists grapple with all the time. How do we learn to successfully "sample and remix" content generated by others?
We've found that appropriation is a particularly complex skill when it comes to schools. Teachers are concerned with the apparent ease of plagiarism and confusions around copyright and fair use. We tend to talk about appropriation in terms of remix culture because most young people are more familiar with it. In the Teachers' Strategy Guide, we even talk about Herman Melville as a remixer because of the way he incorporated elements from many sources, including the Bible and scientific texts, with a classic story of revenge in his novel Moby-Dick. With remixes we don't just mean a creative work that borrows pieces from others, but a creative work that builds on and transforms the meaning of the original source or sources. We see in the process of making remixes a way for students to think about media critically, become an author, and understand their audience.

That being said we understand educators and students want to know more about their rights around copyright and fair use. NML made several required challenges in the Learning Library that explore real-world situations and provoke discussion around the state of copyright and how our use of new media is challenging it.

New Media Literacy: An interview with Hillary Kolos -- Learning Matters

Podcast: "Cinematic Games"

2009-11-02T21:35:54Z

Many people talk about "cinematic" games, but what does this really mean? Over their century of existence, films have been using a range of techniques to create specific emotional responses in their audience. Instead of simply using more cut-scenes, better script writers, or making more heavily scripted game experiences, game designers can look to film techniques as an inspiration for new techniques that accentuate what games do well. This lecture presents film clips from a number of classic movies, analyzes how they work from a cinematic standpoint, and then suggests ways these techniques can be used in gameplay to create even more stimulating experiences for gamers, including examples from games that have successfully bridged the gap.

Richard Rouse III is a game designer and writer, best known for The Suffering horror games and his book Game Design: Theory & Practice. He is currently the Lead Single Player Designer on the story-driven first-person shooter Homefront at Kaos Studios in New York City.

Podcast: "Transatlantic Acousmatics"

2009-11-02T17:18:32Z

In 1897, the year H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man was published, Marconi filed his patent and established the first station for wireless telegraphy, what would become radio. Wells's novel reads as if it were an instruction manual for the uses and abuses of the nascent radio voice. In this podcast, Picker argues that, in conjunction with the racist basis of much fin-de-siecle anxiety, the acousmatic status of Wells's protagonist allows for a conspicuous if incoherent racial performance. This performance tests the limits of Wells's sympathetic imagination even as it further amplifies the voice of Griffin, the Invisible Man. Picker begins with Wells's story and goes on to show how, when one attends to questions of voice and sound technologies in several different media, the racial and ethnic dimensions that become audible forge invisible connections among modes of art that we have been taught to keep distinct. Tracing a transatlantic route from fiction to radio and sound film back to fiction, this approach offers a new way to characterize a crucial period of change from the late Victorian to the modern world.

John Picker is Visiting Associate Professor of Literature at MIT, where he arrived this fall after several years as Associate Professor of English at Harvard. He is the author of Victorian Soundscapes and has ongoing interests in sound studies, media history, and the literature and culture of the Victorian era. His many articles and book chapters include, most recently, an essay on "Yankee Doodle" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" in A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors and out this September from Harvard University Press.

"10 Things Corporations Can Learn from Pro Wrestling" and more from Sam Ford via Fast Company

2009-10-30T13:35:50Z

CMS alum and Convergence Culture Consortium researcher Sam Ford this week worked as a guest blogger at Fast Company, writing about spreadable media as well as his favorite topic, pro wrestling:

If we buy into the fact that corporate America needs to understand popular culture to really be able to relate to its audiences and communicate effectively--Grant McCracken's idea of the "chief culture officer" that I wrote about last week--then what better place to start than pro wrestling? It's very existence feels like an anomaly, with fans loading arenas by the thousands and gathering around television sets by the millions to watch (primarily) men performing the illusion of one-on-one sporting competition, while most fans know that what they are watching is for show.
[...]

I've found wrestling often acts as a carnival mirror to our culture, stretching and magnifying the underlying fears, prejudices and tension points amongst us. However, I think wrestling provides all sorts of learning that corporate America should pay attention to as well.

Sam Ford's posts for Fast Company:

Futures of Enterainment nearly sold out, get your tix now!

2009-10-30T12:32:36Z

Day 2 of Futures of Entertainment 4 is now sold out.

That leave just a handful of tickets available for Day 1. If you're still (inexplicably!) on the fence about attending a conference whose first day alone will feature Wired's Frank Rose, the head of the BBC's Fiction & Entertainment Multiplatform Commissioning, NYU's Stephen Duncombe, and our old friend Henry Jenkins, register for Day 1 today!

Futures of Entertainment 4
November 20 and 21 (Friday and Saturday)

Registration

Program

More about the conference

Gambit's Philip Tan in the New York Times

2009-10-29T13:23:45Z

Today's New York Times Thursday Styles section features an article on FarmVille, Facebook's most popular game made up of players tending their virtual farms. Does its popularity signal a wish for quieter times? "Some academics," by which the Times means Philip Tan of the Gambit Game Lab, think so:

Some academics have gone so far as to suggest that their collective popularity points to a widespread yearning for the pastoral life.
"The whole concept of 'I'm sick of this modern, urban lifestyle, I wish I could just grow plants and vegetables and watch them grow,' there is something very therapeutic about that," said Philip Tan, director of the Singapore-M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab, a joint venture between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore to develop digital games.

Of course, real-life farming is quite a bit messier and more dangerous than FarmVille (perhaps just one reason that FarmVille players outnumber actual farmers in the United States by more than 60 to 1). Yet some of the game's biggest fans are farmers.

"I was having all these deaths on the farm and hurting myself on a daily basis doing real farming," said Donna Schoonover, of Schoonover Farm in Skagit County, Wash., who raises sheep, goats and Satin Angora rabbits (real ones!). "This was a way to remind myself of the mythology of farming, and why I started farming in the first place."

To Harvest Squash, Click Here -- New York Times

Jobs: Teacher Education Program looking for educational games programmer

2009-10-20T20:29:10Z

MIT's Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP) is seeking a talented web application developer with experience working for educational audiences or developing games.

The STEP lab does research and development of new technologies for education, primarily educational games and simulations. Currently, the lab is developing the next generation of mobile educational games, called Ubiquitous Games. These games can be played on any computer with an AJAX compliant web browser, but are designed to be played on mobile devices with webkit browsers (i.e. Android, iPhone, etc). Currently, there is one prototype game built on the UbiqGames platform, and development is slated to begin shortly on four more games.

STEP is seeking a web application developer capable of working within the very general structure defined by the prototype game to develop the four new games. The games will likely be built on an existing Ruby on Rails framework. The programmer will work on a close-knit team with game designers and a project manager. This person will have the opportunity to, and should be excited to make substantial contribution to the overall design of the project/games. If you want only to take perfectly detailed specs and translate them to code, this job is not the right fit.

Required Experience/Characteristics Include:

coding database driven web applications

data modeling and implementation, preferably in MySQL

Object Oriented programming of some flavor

user interface design

excitement about educating students, particularly in science

experience with either educational product development or game development

strong record on collaborative projects

Additional Desired Experience/Characteristics Include:

Ruby on Rails development

development of the system architecture for web applications

good sense of humor

enthusiasm for innovative projects at the intersection of games, learning, and technology

The position is full time for 1.5 years. Salary $50-60K/year depending on experience.
Interested candidates should submit letter and resume to tep-jobs@mit.edu with "UbiqBio Programmer" in the subject line.

From the CMS blogs: "Google Wave: Innovating Innovation at the Expense of Innovation"

2009-10-20T12:47:40Z

Today on the Convergence Culture Consortium blog, Alex Leavitt moves past the Google Wave hype to examine how it might actually fare, based on lessons learned from other recent innovations like YouTube.

Like YouTube, Google Wave is a platform (instead of video, based around collaborative communication) that is beginning to aggregate a community. But I have a question: Will Google Wave crush the innovative potential of its users?

"Google Wave: Innovating Innovation at the Expense of Innovation" -- Convergence Culture Consortium blog

"Breaking Down Advertising's Walls": CMS researcher Sam Ford in Fast Company

2009-10-20T12:33:09Z

Sam Ford is a CMS grad, a CMS researcher, and a director of the communications company Peppercom. He's also now a blogger at Fast Company.

In his first post, Ford writes about convergence culture's reasonable obsession: breaking down walls between media.

My movement from an academic working with industry to an academic within the industry was driven by my interest in how companies and their audiences converse; what better place to study that conversation than public relations? In my position today at Peppercom, I remain especially interested in why and how the industry and the academy should collaborate around media and the humanities. My posts here at Fast Company this week will focus on this theme: what can the industry learn from the academy, and vice versa?

"Breaking Down Advertising's Walls" -- Fast Company

Podcast: "Political Remix Video: A Participatory Post-Modern Critique of Popular Culture"

2009-10-16T18:47:48Z

Remixers are on the front lines of the battle between new media technologies and impeding copyright laws that threaten to obstruct the public discursive space for critiquing popular culture. These spaces are abundant with meticulously crafted and articulate video remixes that deconstruct social myths, challenge dominant media messages and form powerful arguments reflecting the participatory nature of both pop and remix cultures. We'll deconstruct these videos, honor the history of female fan vidders and the influences of African-American hip-hop cultures and debate the remix's ability to effect actual change.

Elisa Kreisinger is a video remix artist, hacktivst and writer. She co-edits the blog, PoliticalRemixVideo.com, teaches new media to Cambridge teens and is currently working on her first screenplay.

"Video games are hard, people don't like to play easy games": Eric Klopfer in the Boston Globe

2009-10-14T14:02:59Z

An article in the Boston Globe offered the latest defense of video games as a great brain developer, quoting The Education Arcade's Eric Klopfer (shown at right):

"Video games are hard,'' said Eric Klopfer, the director of MIT's Education Arcade, which studies and develops educational video games. "People don't like to play easy games, and games have figured out a way to encourage players to persist at solving challenging problems.''
The games aren't just hard--they're adaptively hard. They tend to challenge people right at the edge of their abilities; as players get better and score more points, they move up to more demanding levels of play. This adaptive challenge is "stunningly powerful'' for learning...

The article also cites a recent paper out of UC-Irvine which showed that three months of playing Tetris made teenage girls' brains more efficient. "Parts of the cortex, the outer layer of their brains responsible for high-level functions, actually got thicker."

However, no one knows for sure if that kind of improvement leads to long-term, generalized smarts. "Until now, people have been asking can you learn anything from games?'' the Globe quotes Klopfer as saying. "That's a less interesting question than what aspects of games are important for fostering learning.''

How video games are good for the brain -- Boston Globe

CMS is a top place to find "tech-focused advertising talent": AdAge

2009-10-14T12:43:16Z

Advertising shops are scouring for creative technologists: a rare breed familiar with technology and conversant with new forms of media, but also able to translate that know-how into compelling digital-branding vehicles.
[...]

Look beyond portfolio schools to the growing group of programs that incubate tech-minded talent. Favorites include the Rochester Institute of Technology, the aforementioned Hyper Island, a Swedish digital-ad school, MIT's Comparative Media Studies program and New York University's interactive telecommunications program. Also expected to be a breeding ground for new digital talent is Boulder Digital Works, a new stateside graduate program featuring mini-courses from Hyper Island.

Advertising Age: Where to Find Tech-Focused Advertising Talent